20th European Union Film Festival 2010

The Sleeping Child
L’enfant endormi

A day after their wedding in the countryside of north-eastern Morocco, a young bride, Zeinab, is left alone by her husband as he joins his countrymen to work clandestinely in Europe. Zeinab discovers that she is pregnant. Not wanting her baby to be born before her husband’s return, she prolonges her pregnancy. Time passes. Her husband does not return.

Fly by Rossinant
Fly by Rossinante

A story about Bulgarian musicians, making a tour of Europe. In the morning they had a matinee in Graz and at night they are supposed to have a gala in Vienna. Fly by Rossinant is a musical incorporating opera and silent movies elements.

Terribly Happy

Robert has a number of skeletons in his closet, which he is determined to bury. Although hardly his dream job, Robert sees the position of temporary village constable as a necessary stage on the road to rehabilitation. He just needs to do well and generally behave by the book. However, village life and the macabre provincial order don’t fit easily into Robert’s plans. Nothing is ever straightforward, and certainly not when you are way out in the country.

One Foot Under
Toinen Jalka Haudasta

Visa Vuorio is in the middle of a crisis in his personal life. He is also mortally sick. By profession Visa is a gardener and before he dies he wants to create the garden of his dreams. Hanna Manninen is a journalist who wants to do a series of stories on the last wishes of the dying man. While achieving his last wish with Hanna’s help, Visa realizes that he has found the love of his life, but all too late.

One Foot Under is a tear-jerking romantic comedy about the limited nature of our time on earth.

Focusing on mortality reminds us to rejoice in life. As Visa says: Isn’t life too short anyway; it’s over in the snap of a finger and leaves you with the question: Did I make the right choices? Did I choose the right person to love?

The Father of My Children
Le Père de mes Enfants

Grégoire Canvel has everything going for him. A wife whom he loves, three delightful children, a job that excites him. He’s a film producer. Discovering filmmakers, accompanying films that correspond to his idea of cinema, open and free and close up to life - that’s his reason for living. Grégoire finds total fulfillment in his work, to which he dedicates almost all his time and energy, except for weekends, which he spends with his family in the countryside.

These interludes are as precious as they are fragile. Grégoire’s confident bearing and charm have won him admirers everywhere. He seems invincible. And yet, his prestigious production company, Moon Films, is unstable. Too many films produced, too many risks taken, too many debts. Grégoire continues to keep moving forward, no matter the cost. Just where will this headlong rush lead him? One day, he’s obliged to face up to reality. A word hovers: failure. And a deep lassitude, which will soon, secretly, turn into desperation.

Same Same But Different

It was just one night after the club. It became tender love. And suddenly a matter of survival. Same Same But Different tells an unusual, modern love story. A young German falls for a Cambodian girl and stays by her side, even though she is HIV positive. Based on the true story of Benjamin Prüfer and Sreykeo Sorvan.

Little Greek Godfather
Proti Fora Nonos

11 year-old Alex is sent to the island of Crete by his father, opposition leader of a new Greek political party, to rally up votes by baptizing the baby girl of a local politician and aspiring parliamentary deputy. Arriving in 1960s Crete with his basketball in a bag sling, Alex realizes the mission is harder than he expected. His first baptism-initiation in the art and tricks of politics as well as a new friendship help him wonder for the first time about his own needs instead of his father’s expectations.

The film is based on a short novel inspired by personal experiences by Nikos Papandreou, son of Greece’s former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and brother of current Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Chameleon
Kaméleon

Gábor Farkas is a conman by profession. He ensnares plain-looking, lonely women with acts of love and then cheats them out of their savings. One day he becomes tired of his small-time swindles and craves a real challenge. He meets Hanna, a rich and beautiful ballerina who is trying to return to the stage after an absence from it caused by an accident.

Gábor has to use every trick up his sleeve in order to make the girl take him seriously: he acquires a luxury apartment, a sports car, a medical degree and even an entire hospital to impress her. But his lies are so complicated that he gets entangled in his own ropes and in the end is no longer even sure what he wants to achieve.

The Secret of Kells

The story is set in the 9th century. Twelve-year-old Brendan is educated by his uncle, Abbot Cellach, who holds a firm grip on his nephew and expects him to follow in his footsteps. One day, Brendan meets Brother Aidan, a master illustrator who shows him the beauty of art and stimulates his creativity and fantasy. Finally, Brendan decides to break free in search of his dream: completing the valuable Book of Kells. On his journey through the forest, he has to face his biggest fears.

A Perfect Day
Un Giorno Perfetto

Based off of Melania Mazzucco’s novel, “A Perfect Day” is a fresco of emotion and compassion. A dysfunctional family is torn apart in a moment of violence and anger in this drama.

Antonio is a burly and short-tempered man who works as a bodyguard for a high-ranking politician. He is officially married to Emma, but she’s left him and has gone to live with her mother Adriana, taking their kids Valentina and Kevin with her.

Antonio is determined to win Emma back. However, Emma makes it clear that she has no interest in getting back together with him and wants him to stop following her. Antonio flies into a rage, attacks Emma, then storms off with the children in tow. Once Emma collects herself, she realizes she must act quickly if she wants her kids back, and with the help of her friend Mara, they comb the city in search of Antonio.

Irina Palm

Maggie, a 50-year-old widow-still faithful to her dead husband, desperately needs some money to pay for a medical treatment for her ill grandson. After several unfruitful attempts to find a job, Maggie finds herself roaming the Streets of London Soho. Her eye is caught by a small poster in the widow of a “shop” called “Sex Word” which reads: ”Hostess wanted”. Too desperate and lost to realize what she does she finally enters.

Mickey, the owner, is embarrassed at first, but intrigued by Maggie he decides to have fun and offers her the job. Under the pseudonym of Irina Palm, Maggie courageously gets to know her first anonymous customers. Mickey observes his recruit. Maggie, who applies herself in order to keep her job, fascinates him. When she does something, she makes sure she does it well.

Hannahannah

Hannah, a stubborn outsider within a large family, watches her family with mixed feelings as they welcome her new boyfriend.

Hannah, the headstrong rebel of seven siblings, tries to avoid the preparations for her parent’s wedding anniversary, but her charming brand-new lover Victor sort of drags her along, and soon proves to be an ideal son-in-law.

As Victor assumes full responsibility for organizing the anniversary river cruise, Hannah is left with mixed feelings. Yet when Victor confides in her that her family is communicating terribly, she claims he is not the person to judge. Suddenly Hannah seems uncertain whether to stay with Victor who proves quite patient and understanding.

The Offsiders
Boisko Bezdomnych

Jacek is an ex-player of Polish football representation and a current homeless inhabitant of the Warsaw’s Central Station. Against all odds he decides to establish a football team with his fellow misfits: an ex-priest, an ex-seaman, an ex-miner, an ex-minister and even an ex-astronaut.

Partly through coincidence, partly thanks to other people’s kindness, the men achieve champion skills: they will officially represent Poland at the Homeless World Cup.

Portugal Inc.
Portugal S.A.

A self made man, married to an ambitious and vicious woman, has to decide between being loyal to his boss and remaining faithful to his friend. His boss is a very powerful businessman who made a big deal with support of the government under certain conditions that he has no intentions to fulfil. His friend is the minister who engaged himself in getting political and financial support for that deal.

Broken Embraces

A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he didn’t lose only his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life.

This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can’t direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.

In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide.

Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco.

One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry can’t refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that he’ll fall asleep.

The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of “amour fou”, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces.

Everlasting Moments
Maria Larssons Eviga Ögonblick

In Sweden in the early 1900s – in a time of social change and unrest of war and poverty – the young working class woman Maria wins a camera in a lottery, and decides to keep it – a decision which alters her whole life. The camera enables Maria to see the world through new eyes, but it also becomes a threat to her somewhat alcoholic womanizer of a husband, as it brings the charming photographer Pedersen into her life. The film is based on a true story.

Unmade Beds

“Unmade Beds” is a lyrical tale of two solitary expats crossing paths in the cosmopolitan art-rock milieu of a sprawling East London squat. Axl arrives in the UK to look for his long lost father and instead is adopted by the bohemian Mike and Hannah who introduce him to gigs in English pubs and free spirit living. Vera is a Belgian heartbreaker who strikes up a charming romance with X Ray Man until a failed meeting sets her on a quest to recapture traces of time they spent together by taking polaroids.

An idiosyncratic and atmospheric anti-romance, Unmade Beds has screened competitively in 2009 at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals and at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Features music from Plaster of Paris, (We Are) Performance and Tindersticks as well as many more. Unmade Beds is this year’s coolest paean to good music, bad hangovers and lost love.